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Comment by labcomputer | Hacker News Reader

> i agree. but it's uncanny that stochastic generation of language yields a form of recognizable intelligence.

It's funny, I used to think it was complete and utter horseshit when literature professors would say that the meaning of a text is created by the reader, not the author.

Since LLMs have become commonplace, I have completely reversed my opinion on that.

That you see recognizable intelligence in the output of stochastic generation is because you are imposing meaning on it. It is why "claudish" is so hard to read--you are trying to impose meaning on a sequence of words that was stochastically generated, and it takes mental effort to do that.

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I'm not so sure about that.

If Claude can write formal mathematical proofs (that a machine can check), or it can write software that works, where's the head of the reader that imposes the meaning?

  > you see recognizable intelligence in the output of stochastic generation is because you are imposing meaning on it

i am not an expert in any of this, but intuitively i largely feel the same... the character we see as "claude" is mostly in our heads; its almost like a "super rubber duck" phenomenon or something

I fail to see what exactly is explained, or clarified by the theory here. Postmodernist philosophers are notorious for writing texts which make readers struggle. Surely, it doesn't mean "Foucault-ese" is somehow more stochastically generated than "Claudese".

Reading what you wrote, I must interpretively attempt to construct a model of what you may have meant and what you may believe, because on the surface it contains multiple claims that are frankly false in my experience (itself a probabilistic world model).

> a sequence of words that was stochastically generated

As was your comment (and mine, and the others on this page and elsewhere).

With Claude I know that there is no source meaning or belief, but it helps to impose Dennett's "intentional stance" and treat it as if there were, up to a point. That there is such a "point" allows be to manipulate it in my attempts to extract factual information implicit in its training data, expressed probabilistically via its stochastic processes.

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